


Hacks and Propaganda

by 12drakon



Series: Shiny [3]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers Generation One
Genre: Dark, Hacking, Hope, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture, Spies & Secret Agents, Unreliable Narrator, Virtual Reality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-25
Updated: 2015-10-25
Packaged: 2018-04-28 03:03:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5075281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/12drakon/pseuds/12drakon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Autobot Jazz wants autonomy, and Decepticon Soundwave wants control. In “Shiny” they lost their hope for what they want; here they find hope again, in dark places.</p><p>When Soundwave’s team breaks the Virtual Reality Treaty, hacks the Autobot VR, and makes most Autobots overload so violently they are incapacitated, Jazz is left the acting commander. He can follow the Decepticons’ lead in war to its logical next step in dirty tactics, and escalate the hostilities. Or he can try to play the strategic long game for freedom and compassion. </p><p>Between propaganda, hacks, and virtual realities, things aren’t what they seem.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Autobot Jazz

**Author's Note:**

> Big thanks to [Ultharkitty](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ultharkitty/pseuds/ultharkitty/works) for beta reading and discussions, to dragonofdispair for discussions, and to DarthKrande for suggesting the poem and helping in translation.
> 
> This story is written for Ultharkitty’s straightforward/poetic writing style challenge: http://ultharkitty.tumblr.com/post/130003230507/writing-style-challenge-thing
> 
> The VR concept is from the Jazz x Prowl livejournal community: “In this world, recharging involves plugging yourself into the main computer system for proper defragmentation. While your processor gets recharged, your consciousness is put into a virtual reality world created by the main computer system. Cybertronians can interact with others plugged into the system or choose not to interact. This system is controlled by artificial intelligence and reacts according to each mech’s needs/wishes/desires.”
> 
> Time units: nanoklik is a brief moment, klik is about a minute, joor is about an hour.

As soon as the Decepticons released the overrides from his VR avatar, Jazz made himself boot from recharge. It was fast, too fast; his sensor net glitched. Ghosts of shiny golden crystals from the recharge-nightmare still swam in his optics, and phantom blaster fire rang in his audios. This side of the dreams, his horror grew with each real data input: he smelled electric burns, felt he was lying in something wet that his receptors tagged as another’s energon, and heard its drip over the edge of the berth, somehow louder than a medic’s siren from the corridor. Next to Jazz, a guttering electromagnetic field flickered down-up-down; the frame convulsed weakly, and labored vents rattled to nothing. Blaster!

 ***

“Hello Autobots, Jazz here, reportin’ from the medbay.” He turned up the microphone’s gain, hearing his voice from the speakers, weak and flat. He wanted to scream.

But more than that he wanted to drop it all and go stand by the medberth holding Blaster’s hand. A long time ago, at the beginning of the war, Jazz would often feel this way: _Frag it all. I am hurt and scared. Can I go home now?_ Back then, he had thought himself a newbie coward and everybody else brave. He had locked the fear in a partition behind a strong firewall, and the rest of him stayed with the war, copying the Autobots he admired and the enemies he grudgingly respected.

By now, Jazz knew better. Officer or soldier, friend or foe - everybody was afraid. Whether they let the fear slip through in noticeable tells, in a dimmed visor and too-quiet voice, like Soundwave had in today’s VR encounter, or hid it under inane glib chatter like his twin brats. That’s why Jazz hadn’t been ashamed to ask and beg his enemies to reconsider actions that would bring the war to a new level of terror. He’d asked them to retaliate just to him instead.

They’d said, “No.”

By now, Jazz’s fear for life and limb was dwarfed by the dread of what the war had done to his cause and his spark. For their cause, for freedom, he would gladly stand brave under fire, because that made so much more sense than torturing prisoners, allegedly for freedom.

Jazz wondered if today would be the day he hung up his Autobot badge and went… Where? There was no home anymore. So he kept going, kept saying what the officer partitions in his processor dictated to him: “Optimus and Prowl are wounded, but will be all right. Those of ya who saw him in a bad way will wanna know Blaster is stable. Everybody should survive, every victim of tonight’s virtual reality attack should recover. If ya can move, see the list I just sent for who needs transport to medbay. Go to the quarters of the mech closest to ya and help.”

Bumblebee, the spec ops scout quickest on the uptake, was the first to shout, “What? That was an attack?!”

Jazz waited out a wave of indignant protests and questions from the crowd. He nodded, glancing all around the packed waiting room to acknowledge every mech’s shocked disbelief as he confirmed their worst suspicions. He had seen a lot of battle damage, but this felt worse. Dislocated limbs, torn wires and energon lines, blackened armor over internal burns, and faces pinched with pain - all the hurt came from injuries that happened in their recharge, in the virtual reality dreams that their enemies made real. The saboteur lifted his hand for silence and waited for the ‘Bots to quiet down. He was angry, too. As he would on many a day before, he used that anger to keep himself going a little longer.

“Yes, this was an attack. The Decepticons have always fought dirty, have broken all the treaties we’ve ever had, all except one. Tonight, they finally broke the Virtual Reality Accord. Soundwave’s team hacked Teletraan One and used a virus to hurt all those rechargin’.”

Jazz glanced around the medbay again. His friends’ faces were shocked at this depravity. He nodded - “All except me. The ‘Cons made me watch.”

For a moment, Jazz was back in their hacked VR. Rumble and Frenzy gloated; Laserbeak, Ravage, and Soundwave justified what they’ve done. Jazz was helpless in his immobilized avatar in front of a large screen streaming a live first-person view of his friends through Laserbeak’s aiming sights. Watching as each Autobot avatar turned into shiny cartoon fireworks under her rockets and blaster bolts. Knowing the pain of it was real.

He cycled his vents. “We’ll check on how much they lied, run our own tests, and then send ya details on the virus. It’s a dirty trick, some VR-to-frame feedback loop. Makes VR collisions hurt ya frames. Blaster was hit the worst. We think he’s managed a quick hack to re-route the feedback from his cassettes to himself, to spare them.”

If Jazz hadn’t stayed in Blaster’s quarters that night, if he hadn’t found and clamped the worst energon leak, if Ratchet wasn’t on duty and hadn’t been driving through their corridor when Jazz broadcast for urgent help, Blaster would have…

Jazz locked the thought away and delivered the next nasty piece of his bleak explanation, “The ‘Cons exploited our VR uplinks through hacked overload protocols.”

Bumblebee shouted, “Pervs!”

Several others groaned. By now the Autobots had figured everybody overloaded waking up; this told them why.

In your dream, you could transform and roll out, or step on a mine and explode; the data went to your processor with tags that disabled all reactions from your frame. With one exception: the overload protocols. If you engaged those, the right kind of data from the dream overloaded your frame for real. In your dream, you could interface with the avatars of your lovers, or virtual creations; the data went to your processor with tags that allowed your frame to react just enough. Healthy for frame and meta, if you were lonely, or wanted to play beyond your current reality.

The hack must have switched these protocols on for everyone. Laserbeak said they’d kept some safety measures. From what happened to Blaster, Jazz suspected the only safety was to throttle the data stream from the VR to the processors. But the hack had probably erased all dampener tags on how strongly frames could react. Blaster was hit with all the data meant for his whole team.

Jazz saw mechs nodding as they figured some of that out. A few shared their guesses, but most remained quiet, listening.

Would that Jazz could hide in silence, as well. He had plugged cables into Blaster to transfer energy to him, to try and stabilize his spark. That was a basic life support procedure, even if most of the time mechs used cable links for fun, for recreational interface. That two-way link had been the absolute opposite of fun, but Jazz had learned what others knew. He had felt what Blaster had felt in the attack: processor sluggish and confused, frame violated by pain and unwanted pleasure, helpless to stop the intrusion, and deathly afraid for his small, vulnerable symbionts.

Every Autobot had suffered, except a few who’d been awake and on guard duty, and Jazz himself. He realized that to his Autobots, their third in command didn’t look hurt, didn’t sound humiliated, and seemed to have answers. So they focused on him, their faces showing the angry dread he had in abundance but tried to keep to himself, and the hope he was trying to dredge up and demonstrate.

Trying and failing, but Jazz had to go on. He remembered he had to, but none of his partitions could tell him how, and between their conflicting priorities, it was hard to remember why. He met every gaze, projecting his natural compassion and his carefully constructed reassurance. For his ‘Bots, he was the acting leader in this crisis, until Optimus and Prowl recovered. In his processor, he was back to his new-recruit days: one small scared mech caught in the larger-than-life war. The war that had already claimed his planet and most of his species. Now that war literally reached out of their nightmares to hurt or kill this last ragtag band of his friends. And his enemies.

Jazz’s spec ops training kept coordinating his doublethink partitions. The parts doing his officering made his voice sound confident and decisive. _Be everythin’ you gotta be, Jazz,_ another part mocked.

“The Decepticons claim they did this because of me mistreatin’ a prisoner. I’m not proud of that, but they’ve forced my hand. Ya know all too well that the ‘Cons have never even pretended to honor the prisoner treaties.”

 _Excuses, excuses,_ a part of Jazz supplied, distracting him from saying what he had to say; but he managed, “What ya don’t yet know: they had the hack already. If this prisoner exchange hasn’t failed, they’d have just turned around and used the hack for another reason. I was told they expect us to respond in kind, and then they will go for total destruction. If nobody can recharge, the war has to end quickly, one way or another. Of course the ‘Cons always wanted to dominate, but this time… They don’t care if anyone is left to submit.”

Shouts, indignant protests. The Autobots were angry. Underneath that, Jazz thought, they were afraid. He’d had more time than them to work out what this new escalation implied. Yet another wave of, _We’re all gonna die!_ came up in his processor’s queue. The thought was frightening and, in its promise of ultimate peace, tempting.

Yet again he de-prioritized the partition where the thought endlessly cycled, and made his voice sound not only confident, but snarky, Primus forgive him. He thought - he hoped - Blaster would approve. When all else failed, sometimes dark humor at the enemy’s expense still kept you up.

“Ha, they wish. Poor old Megs can’t even dominate his second in command, no matter how he tries!” Jazz paused for laughter and hoots. Mechs wanted their relief, no matter how weak the joke. Then he continued, more somber, “The Decepticons are just deceivin’ themselves. We’ll never let them win!”

Several Autobots cheered, others nodded, but Jazz found he could not go on. His audios caught snippets about battles and hacks, about turning the VR virus against their enemies, about “hitting the fragging ‘Cons where it hurt.” But all he could really hear were Soundwave’s words, “Projected escalation: severe to terminal” - as the words solidified into reality.

 _At least the war will be over, one way or another,_ the partition that wanted to go home whispered again, and Jazz slammed it down.

He could not take the doublethink anymore. Something snapped; he followed a solution he improvised on the spot, though he had to subdue a strangely strong resistance from some stubborn part of his processor.

In a ruthless deep self-hack, Jazz sent the override to integrate all partitions. Dizzy, he reeled from a soft reboot, barely holding himself up by the edge of a table, his fingers denting the edge. His processor began to pulse with dull, growing pain. There was going to be the Pit to pay.

He should be posing the problem to Prowl, but the tactician was in medical stasis, so Jazz’s computational power would have to do, maybe with some help from those who weren’t too hurt. Jazz rubbed his aching head and posed the problem out loud, “How can we stop the ‘Cons without becomin’ them?”

He paused, as if letting the question sink in, letting others discuss; in fact, he was desperately trying not to crash. He had once explained his partitions to Spike Witwicky: “Take a sheet of paper. Write, ‘The other side lies’ on it. Now turn it over and write, ‘The other side is true.’ Good. But which side of the paper lies and which says the truth?”

Spike had nodded, read, turned the paper to the other side, read, paused and frowned, turned the paper over, read with a deeper frown, and kept turning it over again and again and again. Then he had burst into laughter and given Jazz a hug. “That’s you!” he’d said, waving the paper.

Jazz held onto this happy memory as his processor attempted to handle feedback from thousands of contradictions it tried to resolve all at once. Every old Jazz that was partitioned out whenever his life changed, as well as different avatars from different dimensions of his current situation - all his aspects were having a merry little meet-and-greet. Despite the itch of the paradoxes in his mind, there was a Jazz, one Jazz, who felt whole, wholesome, and processor-upgraded. He mentally yelled at the last shreds of his interrogator and lover personas to take their bickering outside, whatever that meant, and focused all his processor cycles on the search for slivers of hope.

Inspiration came surprisingly quick: for sheer thinking power, the hack worked even better than he expected. In less than a klik, he had a little something that looked, maybe not like the Autobot’s main value of grand freedom, but at least like decent wiggle room. That wasn’t a dramatic insight, but solid beginnings of a plan for how to start the grim work ahead of him, ahead of them all. The work that would mean they had a future.

In a steady clear voice, Jazz said, “It’s not up to the ‘Cons to decide how dirty this war gets! I have a plan, which I won’t broadcast all over the base on an unsecured channel.”

Well, a hint of a plan, but his overclocked processor kept supplying details of a strong but tempered response - Decepticons locked in their VR as he had been, not hurt but unable to wake up, easy to capture… He pictured Optimus, in his favorite avatar as a large friendly dog, negotiating in VR with the captive Megatron. Jazz wondered what avatars the warlord used. They might find out soon.

“We can’t let the ‘Cons force our hands anymore. We will stand strong, but on our own terms. For those with hacker skills, the first meetin’ is in two breems, at medbay observation room three. And one more thing.” He had to show an example of sticking to their principles, and this one was just perfect. “When this is over, I’ll request an official action against myself for what I’ve done to Laserbeak. Not because it has backfired, but because it is wrong.”

Some Autobots murmured; Jazz heared them through static, saw them through his visor’s feed blinking on and off, a long list of error messages on his HUD. He deployed the spec ops emergency patches he kept in case he had to self-heal after harsh hacks in a hostile interrogation. May his processor not crash for another few joors! Not until they worked out details of his plan at the meeting, not until Prowl or Optimus woke up, not until he convinced enough Autobots to act rather than react. He hadn’t felt so ill in a long time, but also as strong. Huh. Who knew doublethink sapped your resolve quite that much?

Jazz kept on talking. The matter-of-fact logistics would help his Autobots and himself focus. “We’ll up our active defenses, of course. Use field recharge procedures till we secure the new VR system. The base is on high alert and your new guard rota is posted. Tomorrow, we will...”


	2. Decepticon Soundwave

Soundwave was a winged white unicorn soaring across the celestial dome to claim the enemy virtual lands for his cause: a silly cartoon avatar to infiltrate the Autobots’ ridiculous dreams. The wave of change, the landscape hacked into golden shine and fearful symmetry, rolled behind. The broadband link cascaded all the real glory of her virtual flights: Autobot VR to Laserbeak’s sleeping frame to his team’s hidden antenna at the Ark to the Decepticon satellite, and then to Soundwave.

The whoosh of wings transformed into the roar of thrusters. Laserbeak turned her avatar into her root jet-bird form, to streak back, to get up close and personal with Soundwave’s captive enemy counterpart, the Autobot third in command, guarded by three more symbionts. In addition to the transmission of what she heard and saw in the VR, Soundwave’s quantum bond with the spark of his spark provided him a perfect reflection of her emotions. In the shared emotional plane of their shared reality, Laserbeak’s fear turned into triumph, cold and grim as a black hole, sad as a ray of light forever trapped beyond its event horizon. The next stage of their war had begun.

Shared reality. Realities. “Laserbeak, please!” Jazz begged of her, of them, like he never had in Soundwave’s memory files, like he’d never begged of cruel interrogators, nor of his intimate friend Blaster, nor of benevolent Primus his god.

Soundwave heard the plea not to escalate the war in surround-sound, a sextet playing the fugue of fear he was conducting through two-way links. Through the spark bonds, he reflected some of Laserbeak’s resolve to Rumble and Frenzy. The twins were babbling so much in their fright, both out loud and to Soundwave personally, that their lower-priority, narrow-band transmissions lagged. These were the first three links.

The fourth link went from the Nemesis console in front of Soundwave to his team’s Ark antenna to Laserbeak’s VR uplink, and then to a virtual console she put in front of Jazz. Thus Soundwave’s image replied to the saboteur by voice, a curt denial, “Negative.” Then proceeded to feed the scared Jazz some half-truths about the reasons why the harsh VR warfare was a must.

And through Ravage, his most trusted and oldest symbiont, his broadest data source, his most reliable fifth link to the scene, Soundwave also streamed data from the secret sixth link, now hacked into his symbiont protocols. Ravage knew of the secret link, knew all their music’s score, and would help Soundwave play their melody to its grand finale.

***

A joor later, the plan was still unfolding almost without a hitch. Rumble, Frenzy, and the two symbiont fliers who had guarded his VR infiltration team on the outside were back, tucked in Soundwave’s chest, recharging, _safe_ , their links fading to low priorities in his processor. Three other themes now formed the music.

In one theme, Soundwave’s lord and master spoke to his army. He stood in front of the giant display of their dark, dead planet, overlaid with a spy drone’s stream of the Ark, the symbolism clear to every Decepticon soldier. Laserbeak perched on Megatron’s shoulder, tiny and bright-red in contrast to his bulky gray frame, drawing all optics to her.

“Fellow Decepticons! Today, we send our enemy a message. Today, we stand strong, while they wallow in pathetic misery. Today, the smallest one in our army” - Megatron inclined his helmet at Laserbeak - “our soldier whom the Autobots so cravenly hurt, became our brave hero. As we destroyed the corrupt Senate, so will we…”

“Destroyed” instead of “subdued”? Yes, this version flowed well. Soundwave was tracking Megatron’s edits to better write the future speeches; he had drafted this one. But most of his processing power was devoted to two key themes, unfolding in counterpoint.

Ravage was his optics and audios for the first key theme. The cat was crouching in the Autobot medbay vent, hidden and ready like a subspaced loaded gun on a civilian’s frame. Ravage streamed Jazz’s speech: “...Those of ya who saw him in a bad way will wanna know Blaster is stable. Everybody should survive…”

That, that was the hitch Soundwave’s team had not planned. Autobots and their self-sacrifices! As ridiculous as their cartoon avatars. The hack was safe for symbionts. Of course it was - Soundwave’s own were in the VR at the time! Why did Blaster have to go and grab all the hurt for himself?

Today, Soundwave’s team had almost lost their kind, the culture of cassette carriers. Can’t have ‘a kind’ or ‘a culture’ if you are the one representative in the known universe. But Soundwave couldn’t linger in the echo of Blaster’s suffering. He had to stay attuned to the second key theme, the secret link. He had to wait for just the right time, and then nudge the mech at the link’s other end. They were nearing the moment when everything could change, when, as the saying had it, a Seeker angling his ailerons could cause a hurricane. Would the Autobots follow the path Soundwave claimed was his projection: severe to terminal escalation? Would the Autobots torture prisoners, hurt or maybe kill the Decepticons through hacks to their VR, fight dirty - and efficiently?

Jazz seemed to buy the story that Soundwave expected and planned for the Autobots to dance. To join the Decepticons in the dirty, no-holds-barred swing of war, ending in a dramatic frozen pose, with one partner on the ground.

Soundwave never revealed his primary plan, for the Autobots to sit that dance out. If he did, they would be less likely to do so. Jazz asked, begged Soundwave to stop Decepticons’ next step, the VR hack, but that would not work. Soundwave wanted Jazz to dampen the Autobots’ response instead. It would work, if only Autobots would stick to their honorable Code and thus to their predictably weak tactics. Then, and only then, could Soundwave try and convince Megatron to hold back as well. But the ‘Bots were starting to lean the other way.

In Ravage’s primary stream, Jazz was giving a political spin to the implications of a piece of intel Soundwave fed him earlier: “What ya don’t yet know: they had the hack already. If this prisoner exchange hadn’t failed…”

Jazz hadn’t been told that Megatron had ordered Soundwave to develop the VR hack; or that Soundwave only agreed when Megatron threatened to give the project to Shockwave instead, the ruthless mech who was happy to live alone on a burnt planet; or that Soundwave’s hesitancy might have caused Megatron to bluff with Laserbeak, as a hint to her carrier. Still, the clever saboteur had figured out enough implications of what little he knew, because next he said: “If this prisoner exchange hadn’t failed, they’d just turn around and use the hack for another reason.”

Soundwave was glad Jazz now understood why his plea was futile. For what would happen next, the two of them, enemies as they remained, needed a closely shared view on the reality. Jazz continued his speech, “I was told…”

Soundwave knew, and had planned, everything important Jazz was told, so he focused on the secret link instead, receiving the saboteur’s thought, _We’re all gonna die!_ with the emotive overlay of a tired hope for the ultimate end. Jazz was almost there, and Soundwave was almost ready for his nudge, for a gentle push through the two-way hidden link that was installed in Jazz’s processor during the VR hack.

The program encoded the top level of Jazz’s thoughts and feelings. Without Jazz’s knowledge, it hijacked his comm. system for shielded, short-range bursts of data to Ravage, to their antenna, and then to Soundwave. Ping: there, and back again, the secret link ready for reception, for Soundwave to push a thought and a feeling through.

But Jazz was Jazz, his reasoning a dizzying departure from any score that had been written before, his theme a cacophony that was all Soundwave ever found in the human style of music that was the saboteur’s namesake. Jazz wasn’t just drowning in the dark despair of war, where he could abandon all compassion; or just clinging to his precious Autobot Code and taking the high road. A few nanokliks before the saboteur did it, Soundwave sensed Jazz’s decision to root out the source of his doubt and hesitancy.

No, no, no, that was bad, very bad! Soundwave pushed through the link, trying to stop Jazz from the hasty merge of partitions.

The secret link wasn’t meant to be permanent. Any medical check-up or deep self-diagnostic of Jazz’s processor would uncover it. If Jazz crashed his processor now, and that was a very likely possibility, the medics would have to get into his head to repair it. Then they would know, because Soundwave wouldn’t be able to erase traces of the link if Jazz was shut down in stasis, and wouldn’t have time to influence Jazz’s decisions.

As strongly as he dared without betraying his presence, Soundwave pushed against this other ridiculous, unexpected Autobotish sacrifice. It didn’t work. Soundwave winced from the discordant feedback, then again, hit with the saboteur’s pain, sensing Jazz’s processor rearranging itself after a ruthless self-hack.

Luckily, Jazz wasn’t crashing, not yet. Hurting. Distracted. Overwhelmed by the cacophony, vorns upon vorns of his own messy themes.

Soundwave wondered how it would feel to lose his symbiont partitions. He imagined the unholy data merges, like Laserbeak’s wings on Ravage’s body, and shuddered. But Jazz was enduring, seeking a solution, and Soundwave provided. He sent the package he had prepared ahead of time, the staccato of data bursts carefully matched to Jazz’s native processor frequencies Soundwave sensed through the link.

The hack depended on some of his telepathy protocols and some of his symbiont subroutines. Whispers disguised as thoughts, feelings reforged in feedback loops, the ‘yes, and’ acceptance-reframing of every idea: together, a wild improvisation brought to order, subdued into predictable symmetry.

The Autobots could just lock their enemies in their VR instead of hurting them, Soundwave whispered to Jazz, who grasped the idea as his own. The thought resonated with his principles, and the feeling of hope Soundwave transmitted resonated with Jazz’s desires.

Of course, Soundwave didn’t share with Jazz the defense plans he already had against that type of hack. Not even Megatron knew everything, because Soundwave planned for the Autobots to have a measure of success: just enough that they wouldn’t try a nastier attack. No, he wasn’t telling Jazz any of that. Instead, he whispered that the Autobots can keep their autonomy, and the evil Decepticons can’t force their hands...

Soundwave couldn’t tell if he was conducting Jazz’s music or dancing to it, if he was pushing his thoughts through or reading and strengthening Jazz’s own. It didn’t matter. Everything was back on track, and according to plan. Soundwave hesitated (personal wasn’t important), then went ahead and sent the hint about Jazz’s disciplinary punishment for torturing Laserbeak.

Jazz took to that idea so quickly that Soundwave thought its version might have been in the high-priority queue of the saboteur’s memory banks; and so eagerly that Ravage laughed, silent mirth shared through the bond. Soundwave thought it sad and pathetic rather than funny, but didn’t begrudge his counterpart his strange comfort. Very soon, the Autobots might have very little comfort left, when they lost. Or else, and that was his main hope, the two factions might be back to their usual stalemate, this crisis blown over, their VRs turned into hardened fortresses, hacks and counter-hacks all played out.

For all he was ill from the hack, Jazz felt calm and strong, as Soundwave’s secret link informed him. Decisions had been made, and the Autobot third in command was speaking of mundane administrative matters: “We’ll up our active defense, of course. Use field recharge procedures…”

For once, Jazz’s speech was in full harmony with his real feelings. But Soundwave saw that Jazz’s processor was unstable, and more so now than it was a klik ago. He saw the saboteur’s attempts to self-medicate, and wasn’t sure if they would help or make the matters worse.

No, Soundwave couldn’t risk keeping the link for extra intel, as he’d originally planned. That didn’t change much, didn’t alter the big if-then tree of possibilities and decisions that had unfolded from Jazz choosing a moderate response over escalation (where no trees at all would grow, ever again).

It was time to send the kill signal, remove Soundwave’s link to Jazz, and delete all traces of the hack. Soundwave cycled his vents, clenched his fists, and blocked his end of the spark bonds to his symbionts against the imminent flood of pain.

That is, the real bonds to his real symbionts.

The secret link to Jazz was hacked into Soundwave’s symbiont protocols. He had found no other way to guide the telepathic intrusion delicately enough, in real time. When that link broke, his spark and frame would feel almost as if a symbiont died. In a medical file he’d read, a long-gone cassette carrier said a lost symbiont felt as if your spark was slowly pulled out: an invisible black hole leeching matter from its binary star. Soundwave had never experienced that horror, had hoped he would be spared… Was hoping this virtual death and his real pain would buy his creations a measure of security and shelter.

Soundwave wondered if his link with Jazz, so dearly bought, had even changed anything. Maybe Jazz would make the same choice anyway? After all, Soundwave couldn’t change Jazz’s decision to crash his partitions, couldn’t push Jazz’s choices around too much.

Maybe the Autobots would improvise the same themes he orchestrated. He had only made sure.

Laserbeak chirped on Megatron’s shoulder, asking out loud about the disconnect. Ravage pinged him by radio. To both, he sent, “Soundwave: needs time, will be fine. Stay strong.” He also warned Ravage that Jazz’s datastream was about to stop. Ravage would understand. Soundwave wished they were in recharge for this, like his other four symbionts.

Megatron was still speaking, “We were forced to take this harsh road, but we shall walk it all the way to victory! Because only then will we have earned…”

Soundwave looked at his Laserbeak, turned off his optics, and sent the kill signal.


	3. Epilogue: A Poem and a Painting

[DarthKrande](http://archiveofourown.org/users/DarthKrande/pseuds/DarthKrande/works) said “Shiny” reminded her of this poem, and I got very curious. I don’t read Hungarian, but by our powers combined, here the poem is, in the language of these stories. 

 

* * *

**Poor Excuse for Hercules**

Poem by Endre Ady (1908)

Translated from Hungarian by DarthKrande, Ray, and 12drakon 

 

Pathetic gnomes have been waiting so long.

I wish I could perish a coward,

But no, I am Hercules. I must stand strong.

 

Had these imps any sense to cease,

I swear, I’d break by my own hand,

Had they the mercy to pause and breathe.

 

The swarming, arguing, pestering things expire

When they push me

To a new faith, song, and fire.

 

Would that I could give in to self loathing,

Yet they loathe me too.

I won’t stoop to their level. I must keep going.

 

Would that I could be shattered by pain,

I’d suffer, cry, flee, hide,

But the rabble would laugh, and so I remain.

 

Poor excuse for a Hercules, here I stand.

Denied a night’s or eternal sleep,

I return to my bitter sleight of hand.

 

Hey you, small fries, wretches, unpersons!

Pipe down and show some respect.

Or else, I swear,

I’ll live on forever.

* * *

[Cygnus X-1 black hole binary](https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/cygx1_illust_orig/)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Between Reality and Nightmares](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5695456) by [dragonofdispair](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonofdispair/pseuds/dragonofdispair)




End file.
